2018 Speakers

EMEA Purchasing and Business Services Director for Dow Chemical. John has a 30 year track record delivering value originally via product development, then via market and e-business development and for the last 10 years via procurement. His contributions to Dow’s purchasing organization include: LCCS programs, segmenting & sourcing channels, innovation sourcing, M&A synergies and Purchasing as a Service Business primarily across direct spend. A believer in continuous professional development, John is also the chairperson of the Swiss branch of CIPS.org

Thomas is a Principal from the Düsseldorf office of McKinsey & Company, Inc., and is leading McKinsey's Pharmaceutical supply chain practice. Thomas has deep experience in optimizing supply chain strategy, planning, and logistics in pharmaceuticals and many other industries

Simeon manages 1bn of spend across global commercial categories at AstraZeneca, including Digital, Print & Market Research. Simeon has had extensive experience in a number of global category lead roles across IT as well as recently leading AstraZeneca’s Operating Model Implementation. Simeon is currently working on strategic initiatives to ensure local teams are working closely with centralized global procurement, and setting up a shared service centre.

Dan is a bioengineer who has worked extensively with life science start-up companies. Prior to joining Scientist.com, he advised startups at eBoost Consulting, started a company called ChemoTactics and was the CTO of the UC-San Diego 100K Entrepreneur Challenge. In 2012, Dan was selected as a Siebel Scholar. Dan received an M.S. and Ph.D in Bioengineering from Joseph Wang’s lab at UCSD, where he was a Gordon Scholar. He received a B.S. degree, summa cum laude, from Rutgers in 2006.

Volker Bargon assumed the role as Vice President Procurement at Lonza Ltd. in 2016. Before joining Lonza Volker held various senior executive positions with Boehringer Ingelheim for the last 20 years, among them top roles in Procurement, Operations, Country Management and Engineering. From 2005-2009 Volker relocated to São Paulo to lead Boehringer Ingelheim’s business in Brazil. In his early professional career, Volker held various roles with growing responsibilities in Pharmaceuticals and Aero Engines. He holds degrees in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

Christian Köser is a global category manager for Actelion Pharmaceuticals at Johnson & Johnson. Christian has covered different indirect categories like MRO and R&D. In 2016 he managed a e-procurement project replacing Actelions purchase to order system.

Benny has extensive experience in purchasing transformations from AstraZeneca and at Getinge, Sweden's largest Med Tech Company. Benny is transforming the purchasing organization at Getinge in people, process and performance. Professional stakeholder management is central to become successful in indirect purchasing with ambition to be a trusted purchasing business partner. Benny will share some do’s and don'ts on stakeholder management.

Paresh was recently promoted to the role of Chief Procurement Officer for Norgine, a mid-size Pharma business based in the UK. Previously he served as the Head of Global Indirect Procurement giving him the best possible overview of internal and external relationships at the business. No stranger to ProcureCon Healthcare Paresh will be leading discussions and offering a networking exercise on March 2nd. 

Xavier Derouck has been Global Sourcing Senior Manager in charge of Bioprocess for 6 years in GSK Vaccines. In his current function, he is globally responsible for the purchase of all Single Use Systems within GSK Vaccines. His category includes cell culture, containers, tubings, connectors, filtration, bags and assemblies. His mission is to contribute and address the key challenges of the Single Use Systems in order to support their broadest use in the Bio industry, protect patients and secure GSK business continuity. Xavier is also Subject Matter Expert for Suppliers Relationship Management for Vaccines. He is accountable for driving the Vaccines SRM program in collaboration with the business. He has over 18 years’ experience in the procurement and supply chain, covering the automotive, chemical and pharma industry. Before he joined GSK, Xavier was Procurement Site Manager for the largest manufacturing site in EMEA for Baxter Healthcare. Xavier obtained his Post-graduate diploma of Trilingual negotiator in international trade from the University of Valenciennes (France). He has been a teacher for more than 12 years for Procurement, Risk management and Quality in International Business Schools. He is also GSK external speaker in international congresses: such contribution in international events gives Xavier the opportunity to share GSK collaboration model with suppliers and value creation process with support of the business.

Jyothi Hartley looks after the sales and marketing external spend globally and is the point person for all categories for Europe for Smith and Nephew, a global leader in medical device manufacturing. The global team she is part of numbers 8 all of whom report into the Senior Director Indirect Procurement. Key challenges Jyothi will be focusing on in the next 12 months include increasing engagement in the business to involve indirect procurement earlier in the budget planning, improving spend visibility in Sales & Marketing in more countries and to get better links between strategic sourcing tools for example RFQs and transaction (PO) systems.

Sébastien Bals is the CPO of UCB Pharma, a global mid-size biopharma company headquartered in Belgium with key products in the area of immunology and neurology. Together with his team, he creates value for UCB’s patients by connecting UCB challenges with innovative solutions coming from the supply base. UCB is his first pharma experience after having built a career in industries such as automotive, consumer goods and travel. He’s passionate about performance and about leading and developing high-performing teams to build strong partnerships both internally as well as externally while striving to deliver value beyond savings.

Cheryl King leads the global purchasing organisation within Ipsen. She has a background in Purchasing and Supply Chain, Transformation and Lean Six Sigma. Cheryl is 16 months into her role as VP Global Purchasing and previously lead the Global End to End Supply Chain for Ipsen’s number two product. Prior, she held various supply chain leader and manager roles for a number contract manufacturing organisations. She is a member of the Chartered Institute of Purchase and Supply.

Catherine Jervis has been at Roche for 6 years and holds a key role within Roche Pharma Procurement. In her role as Global Strategic Alliance Leader, Catherine provides leadership, vision and direction in creating, maintaining and expanding global and strategic external service provider alliances, to maximize the success of a partnership across the Roche group. Catherine has 20 years’ experience within the pharmaceutical industry and prior to joining Roche has held positions at a global CRO, as well as roles in research and development and sales within large pharma. Catherine holds a BSc Hons degree in Medicinal Chemistry, from the University of Sussex.

Claire has been at Roche for 13 years with roles in clinical contracting and category management and most recently in a relationship management role working with Roche’s oncology centres of research excellence investigator sites. In her role as Alliance Relationship Manager, Claire works with sites to accelerates the delivery, improve the quality and resolve issues on Roche sponsored cancer immunotherapy trials. Claire has 25 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry and prior to joining Roche has held positions at a global CRO, as well as roles in research and development and sales within large pharma. Claire has a BSc Hons in Pharmacology from the University of Sheffield.

Magnus, a chemical engineer by trade, has worked +20 years at global life sciences and CPG companies, with focus on Procurement, Supply Chain Management and R&D. He got his purchasing training at Procter & Gamble and has spent the last 18 years in progressive leadership roles of strategic procurement and supply chain teams. His life sciences experience over the last decade encompasses companies like GE Healthcare and Hospira where he served as the Global Sourcing Executive and CPO, covering all indirects, biosciences, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and invitro diagnostics. He is currently the CPO for Fresenius Medical Care North America, the world’s largest dialysis services and products company and lives with his family in the Boston area, United States.

Professor Jones is Chairman of Simbec-Orion Research Ltd (UK) and a member of the Board of e-therapeutics plc .Until March 2015 he was a Director of Allergan Inc (USA) , and formerly a main board director of The Wellcome Foundation, where he was responsible for R&D including the development of AZT (HIV/AIDS), Zovirax (Herpes), Lamictal (Epilepsy), Malarone (Malaria) and other medicines. He is a visiting professor at King’s College, London and holds honorary degrees and Gold Medals from 6 universities. He is a founder member of the Geneva-based, Public: Private Partnership, Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) and in 2004 was appointed to the World Health Organisation (WHO) Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health (C.I.P.I.H). He was for 12 years a member of The UK Government regulatory agency …The Medicines Commission. … also an advisor to the Cabinet Office on the Human Genome project ;a member of the Prime Minister’s Task force on the Competitiveness of the Pharmaceutical Industry (PICTF) and Chair of the UK Government Advisory Group on Genetics Research For 10 years until September 2004 he was Director General of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI).

Pauline has over 20 years’ international experience in delivering business value, specialising in procurement. Her expertise includes functional transformation, financial planning processes, target operating models and P2P operational rollouts. Pauline is the former Head of Global Indirect Procurement, as well as Head of R&D Program Management at Syngenta, a leading agriculture company specialising in agribusiness, crop protection, seeds, and biotechnology. Pauline holds a Master’s degree in International Business from Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Lyon

Beat is a sales and management executive with strong leadership and operation management capabilities. He possesses more than 15 years of experience in providing international recruitment, payroll, talent acquisition and outsourcing solutions. His experience includes a focus on highly qualified talent for professional, technical and commercial specialties in Switzerland and internationally. In his role as country general manager for AgileOne in Switzerland, Beat is responsible for operations, sales and service management. He leads the strategic development of our client relationships and country specific value-added services. Prior to joining AgileOne, Beat was a country manager for a global, boutique staffing company and the business development director for a workforce solution provider in Europe. As an executive with one of the leading staffing agencies in Switzerland, Beat helped to grow the company’s business by offering high performance resources and talent management solutions for contract, permanent, payroll and outsourcing projects. Beat holds a technical and higher education degree in business administration, plus an executive diploma in General Management from the University of St. Gallen where he focused on leadership, strategy, finance, operations, and delivery. In addition to speaking some French, he is fluent in both German and English.

Karin Hagen-Gierer joined Sanofi as Chief Procurement Officer in October 2017 and is based in Paris. Prior to joining Sanofi, Karin spent 24 years with Unilever in Switzerland, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Germany and held senior management positions in Finance and Procurement. In her most recent role as Vice President Procurement, Karin successfully led the transformation and acceleration of value delivery of Unilever’s Marketing and Business Services Procurement team. Karin holds Master Degrees in Business Administration (University of Augsburg, Germany) and in Economics (Wayne State University, MI, U.S.A.).

Jan Lausten is the Senior Category Manager (R&D) at Novo Nordisk. He has more than 25 years experience with Procurement for large global companies. He also has 15 years of experience in Pharma Procurement as Senior Specialist and as Manager, along with 15 years with Procurement for Pharma R&D.

Nolan McDonnell is the Director of Business Development at Science Exchange where he works closely with procurement leaders across fortune 100 R&D organizations to help increase access to innovation, reduce administrative friction, and enhance spend visibility, while maintaining clients’ category-specific governance. Prior to joining Science Exchange, Nolan worked at Deloitte Consulting where he drove technology strategy and implementation to enable organizations across multiple industries to achieve key business objectives including: merger and acquisition; pipeline development; commercialization; IPO. Nolan received his degree in Biomedical Engineering from California Polytechnic State University and is passionate about enhancing R&D with innovative technologies.

Julian joined the pharmaceutical industry in 1982, working for Glaxo. Over a 13 year period he worked in a range of sales and marketing roles and was involved in the highly successful launch of numerous new chemical entities and two company mergers. In 1995 Julian joined Innovex (Quintiles) in a senior business development role, rapidly moving onto the UK board and heading a business unit. In 2000 he left to start his own contract sales business, In2Focus. Julian sold the company to United Drug in 2005. Since then, he has been with Ashfield as a member of its Board of Directors for 13 years. Following the acquisition of Pharmexx, Julian is now responsible for Ashfield’s contract sales, nursing and contact centre teams across Europe, Asia, Canada and Emerging Markets.

As the face of CIPS to global organisations around the world Will has a broad understanding of how procurement professionals need to and can develop themselves into world-class procurement experts within their enterprise. Will’s background is in sales and business development at Energy Quote, IQPC, Travelex and Prenax before joining CIPS in 2010.

Darren is a Vice President for Consulting at GEP in Europe and a member of GEP’s Consulting Services Leadership in the region. Darren has 21 years of experience in procurement, supply chain and operational excellence on a global basis. Darren’s focus is on operational effectiveness and efficiency, helping clients with their operating model, structure, value chain, supply chain, strategic cost management and process excellence. Darren is a qualified Black Belt in Six Sigma business process reengineering and is a qualified lender. His areas of expertise include procurement strategy and policy, op model and benchmarking, sourcing and category management, supplier relationship management, source-to-pay, sustainability, value stream mapping, supply chain strategy, inventory management, order-to-cash, fulfilment and distribution, zero-based budgeting, and automation and robotics. Darren has a broad range of indirect category expertise and has worked across multiple industries, including banking, aerospace, telecoms, healthcare, government, utilities, consumer goods, life sciences and retail. Prior to joining GEP, Darren held a number of leadership roles in consulting and industry, including European Sourcing & Procurement Leadership for Accenture, UK&I Operations Strategy Leadership at Accenture, Director of Procurement EMEA APAC for a global financial services organization and Program Manager responsible for post-merger integration in a global telecom company.

Paul’s role at KellyOCG is to define how organisations can most effectively manage their talent supply chain (TSCM), thus ensuring that they can dependably access the right skills at the right time and for the right return on investment. As well as leading our overall TSCM strategy he also leads KellyOCG’s Global Centre of Excellence for the Contingent Workforce Outsourcing (CWO) portfolio. This portfolio encompasses any category of worker that is considered part of the ‘on-demand’ economy. Paul joined KellyOCG in November 2015 from Insight Sourcing Solutions, a company he founded in 2009 to advise organizations in the effective buying and selling of business services. Besides supporting clients directly his expertise was also used by a number of other consultancies/training providers to enhance their own offerings. Prior to establishing Insight Sourcing Solutions, Paul spent 24 successful years working for BT Group plc., one of the world’s leading communications services companies where he held a series of senior executive procurement and commercial positions in addition to leading transformational change programs for the sales, customer satisfaction and product management teams. Paul is highly regarded as an expert in the areas of resourcing, consultancy and professional services. He helped his clients to realize millions of dollars in savings as well as enabling numerous providers to win and retain more business. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply and Black Belt trained in Lean Six Sigma.

Giuseppe has over 20 years of Procurement experience with leading multinationals (P&G, Novartis, and now Merck) and over 10 years of teaching experience at leading Business Schools (including Oxford, HEC Paris, INSEAD, IMD, ESADE and Bocconi). He is a Director at Merck in Switzerland and also the founder of Conti Advanced Business Learning (www.cabl.ch), a company that specialises in negotiation and influencing training. He was three times Chairman at ProcureCon conferences and six times in the list of “top three” most appreciated speakers.

A futurologist, and Chief Executive of Global Futures and Foresight (GFF) - a strategic futures research organization, David’s 35 year diverse business career has made him recognisable as one of the world's leading futurists and strategic thinkers. GFF prepares views of the future on many topics including the Travel and Tourism industry, the world Insurance markets and visions of the future for government, the food, real estate, information technology and communications industries. Since founding GFF, David has worked with many of the world’s largest organisations, and government bodies as well as academic institutions and industry associations. His insights have led many organizations to embrace change and prepare innovative strategies to renew themselves and generate new growth.

Bill Jefferson is a sales and marketing professional with over a decade of business development experience. He holds a degree in Biomedical Sciences and Chemistry from Western Michigan University and has worked in pharma/biotech his entire career, with a strong focus on toxicology and early preclinical development. Bill was previously with MPI Research, a global preclinical Contract Research Organization and Perrigo Pharmaceuticals, prior to that. Bill devotes a great deal of time volunteering within his community and has won numerous awards both professionally and personally for his leadership efforts. He currently lives in San Diego, California.

Michael has been with Novartis since 2010 in increasingly senior roles in the business services division. Before taking on the Head of Procurement, Digital role he led the capabilities and performance team in the global procurement organization. Prior to Novartis Michael held consultancy and procurement roles at other major businesses operating in Europe including Holcim.

Christoph has 15+ years of international experience in the Research and Healthcare Industry, leading procurement and project teams in many different areas and responsibilities such as R&D, marketing and Sales & Operations. At Scientist.com he works towards making procurement and its processes one globally aligned string from demand origination to completion, providing a seamless process for users.

Jeff leads the marketing function at iSpecimen, driving growth through a strategic approach to digital marketing, public relations, content development, tradeshows and events, branding, and advertising. Jeff has led strategy, marketing and product management programs for over 10 years in the life science industry at Thermo Fisher Scientific and Xcellerex, pre- and post-acquisition by GE Healthcare. Prior to his management roles, he was a drug discovery research scientist in molecular and cell biology at UCB Research and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. He has an MBA from Boston University and BA in biology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Global Purchasing Associate Director for Biogen. Elodie has a 25 year track record delivering value originally via indirect procurement, then via new product launch introduction and for the last 10 years via direct procurement. Her contributions to Biogen’s purchasing organization include: segmenting & sourcing channels within Global Distribution Program, supplier segmentation and consolidation and Purchasing as a Service Business primarily across direct spend, specifically in Contract Manufacturing remit, small and large molecules, end to end, from early/clinical to commercial. A believer in continuous professional development, Elodie is also a member of DCAT advisory board.

Graduated from the Grenoble Business School of management and currently Global Sourcing Strategy and Transformation Lead. Thomas is a senior leader with over 10 years’ experience. He has worked and managed teams internationally in Brazil, Asia, North America, Russia, Ukraine, Germany and Poland. Results oriented with proven successes in developing and implementing innovative strategies, he has taken on different leadership roles with a focus on transforming groups and functions to drive operational efficiency and increase productivity